Oral history interview with Ralph Wooden by William Link

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GREENSBORO VOICES/GREENSBORO CIVIL RIGHTS ORAL HISTORY
COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Ralph Wooden
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: February 10, 1989
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WILLIAM LINK: This is William Link and the date is February 10, 1989. I’m here in the
home of Mr. Ralph Wooden. Mr. Wooden, I wonder if you’d mind telling me where you
were born, when you were born, and how you came to come to Greensboro.
RALPH WOODEN: Yes, I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1915, Franklin County. And I came
to Greensboro after completing high school at Central High School in Columbus.
Graduated Central High School and [went] on an athletic scholarship to play football at
North Carolina A&T State University [A&T], which was at that time North Carolina
A&T College. I spent four years here on the football team, three years on the basketball
team. We won one championship when I was here in basketball in 1937.
I came in 1934 as a freshman. I completed my training in ’38, left A&T, and my
first job was in Hagerstown, Maryland. I spent a year there, and then I returned to
Greensboro in ’39 and worked at Woman’s College, which is now the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, for a year, from ’39 to ’40 as a laboratory technician with
the Department of Physics--Psychology. And in leaving there I got an appointment to the
city school system in Greensboro at Dudley High School as an instructor in industrial
arts. And I stayed there a year and probably a month.
And [I] left in ’41 to go to Illinois, Chanute Field, Illinois, because at that time
they were just beginning to integrate blacks or to accept blacks into the air forces. Not as
integration, but as a part of the air forces--but a black squadron they were forming at that
time called the 99th Pursuit Squadron. And they were also training people to teach
ground school personnel, and we were taking training at Chanute Field.
WL: That was before--
RW: In 1941.
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WL: --before Pearl Harbor.
RW: This was before Pearl Harbor. I went out in September 1941. Another young man by the
named Haywood Ware[?] preceded me out there. And there was--we were the first group
that was trained as ground school instructors in the air forces at Chanute Field, Illinois,
and Rantoul, Illinois.
WL: How--why were you attracted to the [U.S Army] Air Force, what made you want to join?
RW: We took--we went to the air forces, we were attracted because at that time, before that
blacks hadn’t had an opportunity to work in the air forces because of discrimination
against them. And they passed the Executive Order 8802, which was signed by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. And this provided us an opportunity to help our economic
situation a little better, too, because we were getting paid much more than we would have
been had we been teaching in public schools at that time.
WL: What kind of experiences did you have in the training camps and in the air bases?
RW: In the air bases, well, I was trained at Chanute Field as an aircraft propeller specialist.
And then I was transferred after that, after serving seventeen months at Chanute Field.
Transferred to Seymore Johnson Field in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for about three
months, because there the people didn’t take well to blacks teaching the whites in the air
forces, especially in Goldsboro. So that provided a different setting.
So we--I was transferred to New York, Rome, New York, Air Service Command
where I stayed until I was inducted into the service. That was in May, and I was inducted
into the service in September. The air forces, I was inducted into the Air Force after
working as a civilian in the air forces.
WL: You started out a civilian.
RW: I started out a civilian, yes.
WL: What was the attitude of the Air Force generally, [and] maybe specifically that the
officers corps--toward having--
RW: Well, now, we had some incidents that were--all right, for instance, when we were at
Chanute Field, the time we were there we had more and more blacks coming into the
ground school instructor program. And of course, the more you have, seemingly it caused
a little more concern on the parts of whites.
So they had, they had one time a white lady posted at lunch hour and had one of
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our members who was eating his lunch and she said that he had approached her. And
come to find out, they laid him off and investigated. They found out that she was kind of
set up as a person to cause--by whites--to cause some confusion among the group. And of
course, he was rehired, he was re-put back on his job, reinstated, and returned to his job
and paid his back pay. Of course, she was discharged.
WL: She was--
RW: Discharged.
WL: Trying to get, provoke the disturbance?
RW: Yes. And in the meantime we had contacted the NAACP [National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People] in Chicago. Aaron Brown[?] was at that time the head
of the NAACP in Chicago. They wanted him [the man who was fired] to submit to a lie
detector’s test, but he did not have to do that because Aaron Brown suggested that he not
do so, that they didn’t have enough evidence to really provoke such a movement. So, and
then the secretary of war had J. Ernest Wilkins, who was his assistant, who was out of
Chicago--James [sic, Jesse] Wilkins, Sr. was assistant to the secretary of war, and
[prominent African American lawyers] Charles Houston and also Thurgood Marshall,
who was with the NAACP. So this caused quite a stir.
But the racial, subtle racialism, racism still existed at that time. And so they were
doing anything they could to provoke a disturbance if possible to kind of allay the fact
that we were going to be integrated.
WL: What sort of people were doing the provoking? I mean, what, who were the people that
didn’t want this change?
RW: Well, they had a number of people in the air forces and in the army and all of the services
who were from the South. It happened to be that the commanding officer of the base at
that time was from Texas, and he was removed from there and sent some place else and
replaced with somebody else as the commanding officer of the base, you see. And several
of the civilians who were there were transferred to other bases, you know, as a result of
that incident.
And then later on they said that they were going to integrate them in all the
facilities, so then they broke up a lot of the blacks and sent them to different places. I was
sent to Goldsboro, North Carolina, Seymore Johnson Field. Stayed there three, three
months. When we first got there they wanted us to strip airplanes down for parts, but we
didn’t agree with that because that wasn’t our job. We had a different M.O. spec [military
occupational specialty]. So we wanted--
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WL: That wasn’t your training.
RW: Yeah, we had the training, we had the experience and teaching in the classroom. So we
held out, and we eventually were put in the classrooms. But the people in the city heard
about that, as well as some on the base. And of course, they didn’t like that. So they were
going to, they moved us out of Goldsboro. And I was one of the two or three of us who
went to New York. Some others went other places--Wright Field out in Dayton, Ohio,
some went up to Massachusetts, some went to Texas, different places over the United
States. So we had, we had quite an experience.
Now I got back to New York and I was working up there in training. And I went
down to Patterson, New Jersey, for a six-weeks training course in electric propellers at
Curtiss Wright [Corporation], and after two weeks down there I was called into the
service.
So I went back to base--my wife was also working up there--and reported. And I
was sent to the reception center after a twenty-one day furlough. I had to camp up to
Long Island, New York. I had nine weeks there, and I passed all, everything with flying
colors, got my clothes sent home, and my G.I. issue. And after about nine days, nine to
twelve days at the center, I was shipped down to Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training.
And after completing basic training down there in, what, nineteen forty--that was
in 1943. In 1944, January 1944, I was assigned to Daniel Field, Augusta, Georgia. And I
remained at Daniel Field, Augusta, Georgia, not as an instructor, but just waiting
assignment for a year and never did receive assignment until ’44. I went to Atterbury Air
Base and then was assigned to a bomb group which was supposed to have been trained in
Columbus, Indiana, at Freeman Field. But we had trouble with racism down there in
southern Indiana, which was equally as intense, and I might say, as equally as, it
displayed itself equally as well in southern Illinois as it did in southern Indiana.
So southern Indiana, then we went to--we were transferred out of there because
we didn’t get along, we weren’t compatible. And we went down to Godman Field,
Kentucky, in the air base down there and we were going to form our 477th bomber group
since we already had two fighter groups, the 99th pursuit squadron and the 332nd pursuit
squadron.
And [General] Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., came to organize the bomber group which
was going to the East. But the bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and that ended the
war. And of course, they deactivated the black bomber group, 477th bomber group, and
we were sent different places. And I was one in the group that was sent to Tuskegee,
Alabama, and I remained there in Tuskegee, Alabama, until I got enough points. At that
time they would discharge you on based on points. I got enough points to be discharged
in December, and also I was discharged into the veterans facility in Dayton, Ohio, which
is near Columbus. I stayed there a month. Then I came out and entered Ohio State
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[University].
WL: Did you consider staying in the air force at all?
RW: I never considering staying in the [U.S] Army, in the air forces, not as--no. Not as a
career. Not after the experiences I’d had as a civilian and in the air force.
WL: So it was sufficiently negative?
RW: Right. I wasn’t sufficiently--because I was, I guess I was the type of guy that liked to be a
little creative. In the air forces and in government service, everything is passed down to
you. And you do what is passed down to you, you see, orders. And you can’t do things on
your own in terms of creativeness. And that kind of fenced me in. I’m not the kind of
person who takes fencing in too well.
WL: How did they handle the day-to-day kind of segregation having, you know, white air
force people and black air force people, say for example, in meals and social activities?
Did the air force--separated all the time?
RW: We were all separated. The blacks were all on one side of the railroad track, where the
coal yard was, and the whites were on the other side. And they had a white dining hall
and black dining halls, white unit squadrons and black squadrons. It was segregated. And
I took the examination for Officer’s Candidate School and never did hear from them in
Georgia. Never did hear from them.
WL: Officers were white?
RW: Officers were white.
WL: Were there any black officers?
RW: Had some black officers, but most commanding officers, top officers, were white.
WL: How did white officers relate to black servicemen? I mean, was there--
RW: Well, they always had a first sergeant that they could handle, and they always had him as
a go-between.
WL: Mediator.
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RW: Yeah, he was in between. And the officers, you didn’t never see them. You’d see them,
but you didn’t never come in contact with them in terms of functions of the air forces or
anything. You see, it was always passed down, the orders--they called them orders--were
passed down. We--that was the way it was.
After, of course, after that, I went back to school, in ’46. That was in ’45 I got
discharged. And in ’46 I went back to school, Ohio State. Remained in school until I
received my master’s degree in education, industrial arts education, at Ohio State.
WL: Did you--
RW: And then I came to A&T in ’47, January of ’47. I went back to finish up my master’s and
came back to work with a former instructor who was ill at the time with terminal cancer.
And he passed, I guess it must have been around April or May. April, I guess, of that
year, ’47.
WL: Did you notice at this point, during the war and right after the war, let’s say, you know,
’42 to about ’47, that there seemed to be any sense that things were changing at all, I
mean in terms of race relations?
RW: During that time the image of the two fighter groups was so popular, because they had
done a terrific job in Italy and the European theatre, that the attitude of some people were
changing at that time. Yes, to some extent. But that wasn’t a general pattern, that was just
in certain, I guess you’d say certain areas. But not a general pattern.
WL: When you came back to Greensboro, did you notice any change? I mean as a student--I
guess as a student you don’t normally notice things as much as when you work at a place.
RW: You don’t notice, no. When I came back to Greensboro the pattern hadn’t changed too
much. I don’t know whether you call war a normal situation or not, but attitudes were
changing, but--for instance, when I went to do my graduate work, I couldn’t go to a
school in North Carolina because they weren’t training blacks for terminal degrees. So I
had to go out of state, and they paid me the differential between what it cost me to go out
of the state and what it would to stay, which is about six hundred dollars for a calendar
year.
I went for a calendar year rather than a school year. I went September to
September, September ’49 to September ’50. I went and worked on my doctorate. And
then I just did my research over a period of four or five years, because I worked. And so I
just took the time to do my research within the time limit. And I completed that and I
completed my master’s--my doctorate in ’56 at [Ohio] State. But at that time you
couldn’t go to a graduate school for a terminal degree in North Carolina and most of the
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places in the South.
WL: How would you characterize the way things were in Greensboro in, say--
RW: At that time?
WL: Well, based on what you remember when you first came.
RW: Yeah, well, we had separate facilities that we--and there was a lot that needed to be done.
And, of course, you know about February 1, 1960, when the four freshman students from
A&T went down and sat at the counter downtown.
WL: Woolworth’s.
RW: But we had one mail carrier, black mail carrier. Now some places they had mail carriers a
long time ago, but here--and that was Charles Fairley, who was the first mail carrier in
the city. And so it began to move. He did a good job and then they hired some more, and
like that. But it was a slow process, you know.
The eating facilities were still separated. You’d go downtown and the seating in
the theatres was segregated, not only here but also in Illinois.
WL: Oh, was it?
RW: Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyhow, in Illinois, when we were out there as civilians, we went, three
of us went downtown to go to the theatre. And we got tickets and we sat up, down on the
first floor. And they invited us up to a balcony, we called it pigeon roost. And we said no.
And so we went out and got refunds. That was Vincent Gill and his wife, and my wife,
myself, and somebody else. I don’t know whether it was Wade [Wayne?] Wilson or not.
Wade eventually became president of Chaney. But there were three of us. Yeah, yeah. So
it was segregated. You couldn’t eat in a restaurant up there.
WL: Just couldn’t eat at all?
RW: No. There was a lady who had a place that she would feed us in her place, a black lady.
WL: And that was it?
RW: That was it. But, yeah.
WL: How--what kind of feelings did you have, you know, in facing this kind of situation as a
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young person, in movie theaters and--
RW: I tell you what, it taught me that whenever you’re in a situation like that and you have--
especially in training--you have to be among the best. In other words, you can see that
you need to have quality and excellence, and you had to work hard to do that. And you
had to be better than a lot of people in the same situation. So you couldn’t be anything
but quality, because you’d wash out, attrition, moving away, you see.
WL: Coming from Ohio, did you notice coming to Greensboro--what sort of differences did
you notice?
RW: Not too much difference. It was segregated out there, too. I couldn’t go to the theatre
downtown. I went to school downtown and I’d pass by theatres that I couldn’t go.
WL: But your school was integrated, was that right?
RW: School was integrated.
WL: High school was integrated.
RW: Yeah. Well, the reason for that is we had more blacks than we had whites [laughs], and
Italians and Germans and Irishmen. We were all there together and more of us than the
others.[unclear] So we didn’t have any trouble in school. You’d go downtown there and
you--and my wife went downtown and they wouldn’t let her try a hat on.
WL: Couldn’t walk in the store?
RW: That’s right. So we had segregation out there.
WL: And nothing new when you came down here. Same thing here.
RW: No. My grandmother lived in southern Ohio. I used to go down there, there was
segregation down there.
WL: Was--what kind of role did A&T play? I mean--
RW: In my life?
WL: Well, in your life [both laugh] or in the Greensboro community.
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RW: A&T always has played an important aspect in the Greensboro community to the extent
that it’s accepted. I guess they’re playing a greater part now, because there’s been
somewhat, well, somewhat integration’s taken over it. Not all together, even now. But
economically, I think that’s played a very important aspect of it. Because when you have
these schools, they generate a lot of money in a community. Not only that, but you get a
different kind of person, human being, too, and that’s very important.
WL: Leaders.
RW: Yes, leaders and this type of thing, you see. And a lot of people from A&T have served
on commissions and committees in the city and have served on the city council. They
served on the--they were--Zoe Barbee was the first one who was supposed to have served
on the county commission, but she was killed in an automobile accident before she got to
serve. Katie Dorsett is on there now. And then they appointed Mr. Hall who is on there,
Bert Hall who’s serving on there.
You had a number who served on school boards, zoning commissions, selective
service board, and on down the line. We’ve also had a number serving on political action
committees. My participation was the political action committee and the Greensboro
Citizens Association, which was an organization formed basically between the
community and instructors and people from Bennett College and A&T College in the
beginning. And--
WL: When was it organized, first organized?
RW: I don’t remember the history of it. I don’t remember. But it was, [both speaking] I guess
it was organized around the fifties, later fifties, somewhere around in there, something
around there I imagine. And of course, they did a lot of things in terms of [TV turned on
in the background, recorder paused]--they did a lot of things in terms of lobbying against
the grocery stores, in terms of employment, you know. In other words, don’t buy here if
they don’t employ us--
WL: Boycotts.
RW: --don’t spend your money.
WL: Yeah. When was that going on, do you remember?
RW: That’s around the fifties, too. Reverend [Otis] Hairston [of Shiloh Baptist Church] was
very active in that. Reverend [Julius] Douglas also was with the [St. James] Presbyterian
Church at the time. And a number of ministers were active in that movement--I think
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Prince Graves [of St. James Baptist Church]. And [Dr.] George Simkins, of course, has
been a leading--a leader in the community, a member of the NAACP. Before his time, it
was [Edwin] Edmonds was before his time, and, of course, [Fred?] Battle since his time.
But they were--the NAACP has done a job, a wonderful job, in terms of voter
registration, education, these types things.
I was also precinct chairman--Precinct 8, which is up here at Gillespie Park
School--for about five years. A pretty large precinct at that time. It went all the way over
across [Highway] 29, over into eastern Greensboro, over in the Bluford area. But they cut
it down later on, they made it small.
When we moved out here we got a letter under the door saying that they wanted to
preserve this area for whites, so to speak. We still have a copy of that letter.
WL: Who’d the letter come from? Who wrote the letter?
RW: I think it was a guy named Hood. I believe it was some Hood, I forget now. But we have
a copy of it. My wife can show you. It’s in the file. And there were whites across the
street, one black family on the other side who was out here before we were. She was a
Hampton at that time, she’s a Barrow[?] now. And then Mr. Merrill who lived in the next
to the last house on this row here. But all across the street was white. But we got along
with the people well. And the family who lived here were the Mitchells.
Now we could not get this house financed by a bank in Greensboro.
WL: Because of its location? Because it was a white neighborhood?
RW: Yes. But the Mitchells had a large family. And one of the sons, who is now passed--and
he had a daughter who worked at North Carolina National Bank, who was a teller, a Ms.
Wilkins--he was a dealer in Cadillac and Oldsmobile in his place on Peachtree Street in
Atlanta. We got this house financed, after our down payment, through Atlanta. He got it,
he arranged the deal for his family. And they wanted us to have the house, because Mrs.
Mitchell liked my wife and my daughter at the time, and she said she would like for the
house, for us to get the house. And we wouldn’t get the house unless we got the lot next
door too, incidentally. So that’s the way we got this house.
Now of course, after the founding of the Greensboro National Bank and the
American Federal Savings and Loan, then the picture changed. You could start getting
them then. But you see, it took that to get it. So later on we had it transferred from down
there to American Federal Savings and Loan. But we could not get this house financed.
WL: Banks would just not accept--
RW: --for a loan. And I think they had a limit on how much they were going to loan blacks,
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fifteen thousand dollars. You couldn’t buy houses for that, you know, or you could some
houses. But they weren’t doing much.
WL: So no matter where the house was, they just wouldn’t lend a certain amount to you.
RW: They wouldn’t let--especially in a white neighborhood. Now when they integrated the
schools up here, there was a man who marched with a KKK [Ku Klux Klan] flag on cross
of an American flag, which made it illegal. And they integrated the schools. Our kids
were one of the first ones up here at Gillespie Park school to integrate the school. They
were one of the first blacks in that school at that time.
WL: How did that go? What--how smooth was it?
RW: It went smooth. There weren’t any, there weren’t--
[recorder malfunction]--cooperation from the parents in the public schools. You
may do all right, but you can do much better with the cooperation.
WL: Why was there reluctance to participate in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association]?
RW: Well, they were just apathetic, as they are now. Still persists, it still persists. You’ve got a
lot of people, I guess they’re tired or apathetic or something, who don’t participate in the
school programs, even though they have plenty of time. I don’t know, but it seem like
they are glad to get rid of the children and put them in the schools so they won’t have to
be bothered.
WL: Won’t be bothered anymore.
RW: Yeah. But you still have a responsibility to your children.
WL: Yep. Let’s get back to politics a minute.
RW: All right, get back to politics.
WL: I wonder if you could say a little bit about how well the, how well or how badly the
political system in Greensboro represented the black community back, let’s say, in the
fifties or sixties.
RW: Well, in the fifties and sixties it was a matter of divide and conquer. They had the blacks
divided up. We had some blacks who were for certain people and certain ideals and
things they wanted, and another group. And later on it became a little more organized, but
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they still have these splinter groups, and that diluted the effectiveness of your vote.
WL: What were the divisions based on?
RW: Well, sometimes it was just on emotions. They liked the fellow or they knew the fellow
back when, and he’s running for office, so we--or at one time, it was all the blacks voted
all democrat all the time. But later on it started changing and sometimes they would vote
for the person rather than the party, you see. It’s hard to get people to realize the strategy
in that, you see.
So we had a mixture of political actions, reactions, and responses. We had a dense
mixture that was really interesting. And we had different people emerging as a result of
that, in terms of what you might say leadership--and they got out tickets and these kinds
of things, you know, to inform people as to who to vote for, had to give them rides to the
polls, and these type things, you see.
WL: Was there a lot of voting? Were the numbers of blacks voting increasing?
RW: Well, we began, we began to vote more, because the NAACP put a great effort in
education and getting out and registration. We put a lot of work into that. A lot of work
needs to be done now in that area. But they did a lot, a whale of a job in that, you see.
WL: Any--was there much of in the way of problems in terms of registration--
RW: Well, we had some problems, yeah.
WL: --in terms of city officials or--?
RW: Well, we had some problems in that, because they said that some of the people weren’t
registered as they should have been. But on the whole we had a very effective registration
program. Sometimes we had it on the weekends, and we’d get students who, they could
cover more ground than the adults can in a shorter period of time, you know. So we’d get
students, and then we’d give them a meal or something, volunteers. But it was good
training for them. And it gave them insight into the political system, you know.
And then we followed, we followed up, and we’d go to Raleigh sometimes. On a
number of occasions I’ve been to Raleigh to represent the political action committee and
some of the things that we were looking for there. But we didn’t, we hadn’t yet gotten
enough commitment from people. We ought to get commitment from people on things
that we are trying to do, if they’re going to do it.
But now the money has gotten involved, so that they do for the people who give
them the money. They’re lobbyists, all these kinds of people, people feeding them, and
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people giving them drinks, and a little bit of everything going on. And so they are loyal to
the people who seem to have the money. I don’t know how that works. That works at all
levels.
WL: Yeah, that’s the way the system works now.
RW: Yeah. You almost have to be a millionaire now to get involved in this.
WL: To run for office.
RW: Even at the local level it’s expensive. You run for mayor now and see if you don’t have
to spend some money.
WL: Yeah, yeah. Does--how well did the city government represent the black community do
you think, or serve the black community?
RW: They were very, they were very, very difficult to work with. We--they didn’t want black
representation on the city council. And they had an at-large system, and we had to work
on that. I worked on that for dividing the county into districts so we can have
representation from the county.
And if you go back over a period of years, we didn’t have anybody up there to
represent, I guess you’d say the black community, but to represent Greensboro, because
most of our people were broad enough people not only to represent the district they’re in,
but also to be interested in their city as a whole, the progress of the city.
We still have some difficulty in that. So we have now party differential, so we get
more Republicans than Democrats or more Democrats than Republicans. They kind of
rule the roost.
WL: In the county government, yeah.
RW: Yeah, especially in the county government. City government’s not--it’s supposed to be
nonpartisan. But I imagine it’s a little bit partisanship in that, if you look behind the
scenes you can see it.
WL: How about city services back, let’s say, in the fifties? Did--
RW: Well, we still need a lot of sidewalks over this way. We worked on that to some extent,
we got it paved down Willow Road, and sidewalks, and that was when I was working
with the--and Mr. [Vance] Chavis and all of us were working with the city on getting
sidewalks and paved streets. We have gotten some, but we’re still short on sidewalks.
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Kids going to school--of course, they been busing lately and they haven’t had much
trouble. But when they were walking to school, neighborhood school--
WL: Walk in the streets?
RW: Yes, they would walk in the streets, you see, which is a dangerous thing now. Somebody
can come along and knock you out in a minute. Then, we didn’t have drugs at that time to
the extent that we have them now. I don’t know, we may have had them but we didn’t
know anything about it at that time. Now we’ve got neighborhoods with sections of them
infested with drugs. And that brings on another problem, and the schools are infested
with it. And that brings on another problem that doesn’t seem right to me.
The local level and the state level have enough money to do anything about the
war on drugs, which is part of politics. And the people who have the money, buying the
homes in the neighborhoods, polluting the neighborhoods with crime and so forth. People
who have money, people who have money are people who are selling drugs.
WL: Did--what sort of effect do you think the city--
RW: And then, we--too, housing. Now all the housing projects are over here, most of them.
Might have one out there, might have one going out northwest Greensboro. We have
three over here I know about. And you get a lot of people living too close together,
especially if they’re low income people, you have problems, you know. And they get in a
cycle and they never get out of it. And then here comes another children, another set of
children. They get in the same cycle. It’s self perpetuating.
So we need some other kind of a system that’s going to help our people to get
themselves out of poverty. Some kind of way--training, training, day care centers for
children so they can train. And they can go into jobs, skilled jobs, that will--where they
can earn enough to move themselves out of poverty. But they have this problem with the
single family parents.
WL: Do you think that city services have gotten better over time? I mean--
RW: I think they have, the quality of them has improved. But I’m not so sure that what they’re
doing is the kind of thing that’s going to help alleviate poverty and a lot of things in life. I
think that sometimes it perpetuates problems. I think there’s some things happening now
in our system that’s cosmetic, rather than remedial and having a permanent effect,
alleviate the situation. I think that’s-- you take the more children you have, the more
money you get for dependency. So having children becomes a big business. I can’t get a
job, I don’t have any training, don’t have any skills. If I do have skills, I can get a job.
I had the same thing in housing. We really don’t have adequate housing for our
15
people. And that is something that has to be addressed one way or the other. And all this
ties in with politics, because the laws, and the policies, and the things that are set by
politicians. The guidelines, the objectives are set by, primarily by, politicians. And of
course, the politicians are not controlled by the people who don’t have money. They’re
controlled by the people--and not necessarily by people who voted for them--but by the
people who supported them in their campaign for money to run for office. That’s the
system. That’s the cannibalistic system.
We do have some people who have empathy and compassion and want to look
for, find a better society than Mr. Bush [unclear]. But we don’t have enough of them.
And the laws and the bills that they’re passing will enhance the few at the expense
[laughs] of the majority.
WL: Let’s--maybe we can talk about, a little bit about the activism of the 1960s. You
mentioned already the sit-in at Woolworth’s, and of course, a couple years later in 1963
you have massive demonstrations.
RW: Yeah, Martin Luther King’s movement.
WL: Right. Did that come sort of out of nowhere or did--could you see it coming at the time?
RW: Well, certain incidents did bring that about. Of course, you know, out in Arkansas, you
know, they had the school desegregation.
WL: Little Rock.
RW: Right, Little Rock, if you remember. That was just a little drop in the bucket, but it made
a ripple on the water. And then there were several other incidents, I can’t remember all of
them now. But I know there are some things happening that did make ripples on the
water, and later on the water became disturbed. I guess they give Rosa Parks and her
refusal to get in the back of the bus a majority of credit in that area. It just happened to,
that that little seed began to germinate and it began to move into the civil rights
movement.
WL: It affected things here, too, as well.
RW: Yes, it did.
WL: People saw those things happening.
RW: Well, when they got the law passed about transportation facilities and public
16
accommodations [Civil Rights Act of 1964], it affected everybody. But you know some
of the fantasies and some of the fiction that they wrote about what was going to happen
after certain people got public accommodations and things didn’t ever come about,
because they said that--and for a location of your house, you know, where you live--they
said if you put blacks in there, it’s going to lower the value of my property. And it never
come about. And sometimes they would raise the value, most instances.
And also these people said that they’d lose customers. In fact, one man closed his
cafe down here, Mayfair cafe. Boyd Morris closed it down before he would integrate.
They had a S&W up here and a K&W out there, and they had, of course, other places,
too. But most of these people [unclear], they’re glad to see you come, because of the
dollar--all of them are the same color. They didn’t know where it came from after they go
through the cash register and the computer.
WL: Did that sort of attitude change real quickly?
RW: No, it was a gradual movement, gradual. People have to be educated, and they have to
see. And strangely enough, they have to see what is it doing for me, you know,
personally. They make it a personal matter. Not for my brothers and sisters, but what is it
doing for me? And if it’s making more money for me, I’m all for it.
WL: Do you think that’s what people like Boyd Morris were most concerned about, that they
were fearful--
RW: They were fearful that--
WL: --lose all their business?
RW: If blacks would come in, no whites would come, and the blacks couldn’t support the
business. And they’d go out of business, because they didn’t have money, you see, to
support it. But, though whenever you did have money, if you’re going to spend it, it
didn’t make any difference. I go out to K&W and other places now, to the motion picture
theatres and sit where we want to, to the parks, to the golf courses. It doesn’t make a bit
of difference. Nobody pays any attention, and because life goes on and those storms and
life goes on.
Even the church is trying to integrate. That’s a remarkable thing, because at one
time, you know, that was the most segregated hour--on Sunday, at eleven o’clock--in the
history of the world. Eleven o’clock services, all white, all black. My church is all black,
and now we have people, white people coming to our church, some joining. And black
people go to other churches and they’re joining.
17
WL: You think that’s changing?
RW: Now there’s certain things that integration did, and that was it did not provide enough
slots for blacks to assume leadership roles. When you got in there you were just there.
You, at that time, you didn’t--when it first started out, you were not student body
president of a school. In fact, you did well to be on the student council. If you’re on there,
you’d be probably the only one on there, or two or one more.
And they have a lot of that going on now. They have a lot of places where they
point to one black and say, “We’re integrated.” Oh no, you aren’t. You’re a tokenism.
You’re not integrated, by any means. But they try to hide behind that, and that isn’t good.
I think we need to open up--
WL: You think that’s happened at all?
RW: --our values, our value system. We need to get our value system lined up. Now if you’re
going to have war, and let you get out there and fight, and get shot, or go and come back,
we ain’t going to let you get to that dollar. And they aren’t going to let blacks get too
much money. If you get too much money, there’re going to try to find out something and
some way to get you out of that money, either accuse you of something or something,
you see. But they aren’t going to let you get but so much.
Now you know the wealth of the country is in the hands of a few people, most of
the wealth. There ain’t but a few people. That’s the reason they don’t like the Jews,
because the Jews have the skills to accumulate funds, money. In a capitalistic society
[laughs], that counts a lot.
WL: What--going back to the late 50s and 1960s, what kind of atmosphere did you have at
A&T? It must have been a kind of an unusual place to be.
RW: In the fifties and sixties?
WL: And sixties. Here the four students at Woolworth’s are all from A&T, a lot of the
leadership in the 1960s, all of the leadership really, I guess, or most of it was from A&T.
Jesse Jackson’s at A&T. It must have been, you know, kind of a dynamic place, a lot of
the things going on.
RW: There was a lot of things happening and--but they tied in with the community, too. The
community supported them as much as they could in the marches. And the attitude of the
people began to change to a great extent, too.
Now all the white people weren’t against the civil rights. There were a lot who
were for it.
18
WL: Such as?
RW: Well, you had fellows down here in Philadelphia, Mississippi. There were only two
whites down there and one black, and there was a white woman killed down there too.
There were a lot of ministers, white ministers, who fought for us, see. So we had a lot of--
and we had that here in the city. Yeah, we had a lot of white people that marched with the
blacks for civil rights.
But the majority of who were in office and power structure weren’t for it. Kind of
shook up the power structure. People got arrested, had so many of them they couldn’t put
all of them in the jails. So they put them down here some place on East Market Street in a
little abandoned [polio] hospital down here. So--they went to jail for it. A lot people lost
their life. Of course, we had the Ku Klux Klan, you know, it was out here. Most of those
guys were white, who were fighting the Ku Klux Klan.
WL: You mean by the shooting? [at the November 1979 KKK-Communist Workers Party riot]
RW: Yes, by the shooting. Yeah, they had a shooting out there, you see.
WL: Was--were you at A&T during the famous visit of the Governor Luther Hodges?
RW: Yeah, I was in there, sure.
WL: Were you, do you remember that?
RW: He couldn’t pronounce Negro. He got mixed up on his pronunciation and enunciation.
And Dr. [Ferdinand D.] Bluford was the president at that time.
We had a hectic year, that year was 1955. My wife was president of the faculty,
ladies faculty club. And we lost a bursar who was found misplacing veterans funds. We
lost a lady, Jean Spinner, who was the dean of women, who had an abortion and died as a
result. And eventually the bursar passed. He lost [unclear]. Went to Goldsboro. He had
sugar diabetes and he passed, Mr. Webster.
Then we had the incident in the fall at our Founder’s Day, when Governor
Hodges came to speak and the students rumbled their feet, rrr-rrr-rrr. And he stopped and
looked at the president. They had told the president not to bring him there.
WL: The students did?
RW: Yes, the students, student government. And students stood behind him, and “rum-rum-rum-
rum.” And he stopped and looked around. You could tell he was very much
19
disturbed. And then he would speak again and he used the word negra-- I don’t know he
said negra or negroid--whatever it was, it wasn’t right. And the students didn’t go along
with that. Rrr-rrr. They went rrr-rum. So he managed to finish up, but when he finished
up he walked out and he never did come back. And the president tried to write an
apology, a letter of apology for him, but I don’t think he accepted that.
And so the president passed in December of ’55. So we had a very, that was a
very, that was the roughest year of my thirty-three and a half years at A&T that we had.
The roughest. I was a pallbearer for Dr. Bluford. And so, yes, I remember that. And, well,
we didn’t have, we weren’t in good favor with the governor at that time. Of course, he
wasn’t in good favor with us either. [laughs]
WL: Well, I guess there was some perception that you were a bunch of troublemakers there, I
guess.
RW: Yes, in a way. At that time, yes. But A&T has always been a school where we get a
mixture of people from all over the country and out of foreign countries, too. And it all
depends on who’s looking at it as to whether you’re a troublemaker or whether you’re not
just going to let somebody come in and walk all over you. All that. It’s in the eye of the
beholder, you know, the perspective that you have. And so I always looked at it as we’re
not going to let anybody--being a graduate of the institution, too--we aren’t going to let
anyone walk over us.
We had two or three strikes when I was in school--food strike.
WL: Oh, really?
RW: Students, yeah. Oh my goodness, we went away, the football team went away to play
ball. We’d gone on a northern trip up in Pennsylvania at the Lincoln University, and
Howard [University], and Hampton [University], and we went away for one week. And
came back and the students were seen going home. Some of them had gone home
already, because there weren’t satisfied with the meals they had been receiving in the
dining hall, so they struck. And they didn’t let us stay there that night. They took us out.
And one of our coaches from up here, South Boston, Virginia. I don’t know if you’ve
ever heard of South Boston or not.
WL: Yeah, sure. Halifax County.
RW: But you go to go up that way, you go up to South Boston on up to Richmond that way,
[U.S. Highway] 360, around there. Okay. And we spent a week up there before we played
our Thanksgiving game, because we played North Carolina Central [University] and we
were great rivals at that time, and we always played on Thanksgiving. And we didn’t do
20
anything but practice in the fairground. They got new tubs, and cooked up that good
country food and we got strong as bulls. [both laugh] We, we slept. You couldn’t get out
any place, because there wasn’t any place to go. And the crickets were hollering and
going on around there.
And we stayed at different homes in that community, because he had been
principal up there so he knew the people that accommodated us. And we’d take the old
bus. We had a bus, the door wasn’t on too well, we’d just take some haywire. And they
called us the little country boys, farm boys, because A&T was an agriculture school, you
see. [laughs] And they’d see us coming to some of these urban schools and they’d be
hollering out the windows, “Farm boy!” I don’t know, but when we left they knew we
weren’t all farm boys! [laughs]
So we came back and played on Thanksgiving day at A&T, down at the stadium.
And we beat, we beat them terrible. [laughs]
WL: But this was after the school had been closed?
RW: This was after the school--well, this was--well, the school was half closed, because some
of the kids could go home at that time. But the boys would go out to the city and hustle
up food and money and bring those girls food and stuff at the dormitory. Oh, yeah, yeah.
One guy, we called him Roast. He went in some lady’s house and she had a roast. He put
it under his hat and walked out [unclear]. Took it to the girls in the dormitory, feed them,
oh yes. Yes, that’s A&T. That’s the A&T spirit. That’s the real spirit. Of course, A&T is
known for that.
I wasn’t surprised. I was right across the hall from the newspaper, and the
newspaper knew what was going on. I knew they were going to go down there February
1, 1960, that these four boys were going down there.
WL: You knew about it in advance?
RW: Knew about it, yes. One of them’s father lived right around the corner.
WL: Did they receive a lot--obviously they received a lot of support.
RW: Oh, they got all kinds of support, yeah, yeah. Ideas too. Yeah. We had some faculty
members, sociologists, that’d work with them. They’d come back for consultation. And
then after while it just picked up momentum. What do you call it when you roll those
balls and it picks up stuff as it goes along?
WL: Snowball.
21
RW: [laughs] It just snowballed [laughs] to a big movement. They heard about it other places
and it started here and here, and it went all over the world. We had people calling us from
California who were our friends wondering what’s going on in Greensboro. “It’s on the
news this evening that Greensboro’s in an uproar, there’s something terrible going on.”
We’d say, “We’re doing all right.” Well, they said, “It’s on the T.V.”
Mary Esther[?] who’s up in Canada now--we hear from every Christmas week--
she’s the one I heard from that we made friends with out in Illinois, and she called. She
had moved. She was a principal up there. She moved down to California, and she called
us. We had relatives in Mississippi and in Detroit, all over the country calling us
wondering what’s happening, wanting to know how we were getting along.
WL: If you’re surviving.
RW: We were out--
[End of Tape 1, Side A--Begin Tape 2, Side B]
RW: One of the things--of course, a lot of the civil rights leaders were lost. But I think it can, it
served to some extent to get us unified, to see--especially Dr. King’s movement--to see
the power of unity and nonviolence, and that you don’t always have to have money to
have power. I think sometimes it’s better not to have money, because you get so
concentrating on your money so you forget about what you’re about, you know.
So I believe that you don’t have to have power, you have to have a spirit. Maybe
you call him Jesus, whatever you want to call it. I believe that has to be there, because
you can’t kill that spirit. You can kill the individual but you can’t kill the spirit. Because
you can’t see him, he’s everywhere, you can’t get at him. So I think you have to have the
spirit, a spirit of good over evil.
And in some religions, of course, they call it, they said the good will win over
evil, because man has within him battleground. He’s constantly fighting evil with good,
good with evil. Whichever [unclear] wins, there’s got to be some good or it can’t win. So
I don’t know. There’s a spirit.
And I think that’s true of A&T.
EP: How long did that--
RW: It’s unique to A&T, because you don’t have guys coming out there like--and girls, too.
We’ve got some women who are very, very--Elleree[?], I don’t know if you know Elleree
Alexander Rossi[?], she was the first black woman graduate of Columbia University in
law. She’s an A&T graduate. She’s here in the city. She’s a republican, an interesting
person. She’s got a book, What It Means to Be Free. That’d be an interesting piece of
22
literature to read. She’s one of our friends. My wife and she talk until two o’clock in the
morning, I’m sleep [unclear]. She’s a graduate of A&T.
They’ve got some outstanding people. At one time you wouldn’t have known they
were going to do what they’re doing. When I was in the air corps you didn’t hear about
any of them. You didn’t hear about Jesse Jackson. But we got some other people, too,
across the country doing great things.
WL: Did--you mentioned that there was a great sense of unity--
RW: Yeah, I believe that’s one of the things that came out, but we haven’t explored it yet, we
haven’t developed it to its fullest maturity. We need unity as much as anything else.
WL: I was going to ask if you thought it had survived.
RW: It has survived to some extent, but we still have a long ways to go in unity. Now the
whites don’t get too much concerned until they get blacks working together. Then they
get concerned. If they can keep you divided up and arguing with each other and fighting
each other and that kind of thing, then they are happy because they’ve got you then.
You’re weak.
But if you can unify like Malcolm X said--we need to support ourselves, and we
need to stop crying so much about what the other guy’s going give us all the time. Let’s
get out and work for it and get it. Let’s not look for everything to be given to us. We want
our share, but let’s work for it too. And let’s work together to get it. No, we aren’t
concerned about who’s going to get the credit and all that kind of business. That don’t
amount up to a hill of beans. Who’s--what going to be the results overall, over a long
period of time. And I think that’s a much more viable program and movement than going
at it individually, a little bit here and a little bit there.
WL: What do you think that the most amazing--
RW: And another thing, we need to get involved, too. We need to get involved. We need to get
people in Congress, positions all up and down the line or across the board.
WL: What do you think the best way will be for blacks to increase power? You mentioned that
one of the things that needs to be done perhaps is to diversify political affiliation with one
party. What other-- [unclear--both talking]
RW: Well, that’s one possibility there, but we need to get our people more interested in voting,
going to the polls, and voting and voting their convictions. They have to go there and
vote intelligently, you know. Vote for the ones who are, who say they’re going to get it
23
right, do right, and if they don’t do right, vote them out.
At one time, I remember I was teaching up in Maryland. They used to give them a
drink of beer and tell them--a guy used to put a beer party on and tell them to vote for
him. And after the beer party was over and they voted for him, that was it. They didn’t
get anything as a result. No remuneration at all. So you’ve got to watch that kind of
business. You can’t sell yourself down the river for a slug of beer or a sandwich.
WL: Do you think--I talked to a number of people in Greensboro about race relations in the
last thirty or forty years. Some people are very optimistic, they think things have gotten a
lot better. Some people are pessimistic, they think things have stayed the same or gotten
worse. Other people are sort of in between. Where would you put yourself?
RW: We still have to fight for what we get. We still have to fight in Greensboro. Everything
blacks get in Greensboro, they have to fight for. Everything. I can’t think of one thing
that has been improved that we didn’t have to go down there and fight and fight and fight.
I wrote a proposal for the county district system and they turned it down, but they
finally had to come back to it. Mr. [Forrest] Campbell was the chairman at that time. It
didn’t please him so he didn’t even bring it up, he just ignored it. He was the one that
appointed the committee. [laughs] He wanted you to do something that he, he approved
of and we didn’t do that. I didn’t. So he didn’t, he just ignored it. But finally he had to
come back to it, because the Justice Department [unclear] said we had to have a kind of
district system that was going to ensure that we had a black on the county commissioners.
We had to fight for it. Everything we got, we had to fight for.
Now it looks like civil rights is being set back a little bit by the decision of the
Supreme Court in terms of quotas. They don’t like that quota business. I don’t know, but
we did make some progress with quotas, but since they’re not constitutional we had to
find a way to keep balance with our quotas. I don’t know how, but I believe there’s a
way. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I believe there is a way that we can keep surveillance on the picture of
employment and other things, too, to the extent that we can tell how much is going here,
how much is going there, and how much is going here, and so forth. And we’ve got
computers now and technology to do that. And if they want to be fair, then they can keep
an account--I guess you call it accountability. There’s not a difference [unclear], on the
overall picture, accountability, what’s going on, and we want to keep balance as much as
possible.
They claimed that they awarded somebody the food stamp appropriation even
though they were hired [unclear] somebody else, but that doesn’t mean anything if you’re
going to get that quality. Now if you’re going to bid low, there’s less quality. I’d rather
pay a little bit more and get quality if the program’s that way. I don’t know, but somehow
or other we’re going to have to--and everybody’s going to have to measure up. I don’t
24
care what color you are, you’re going to have to measure up. So in other words, whatever
you offer, it’s going to have to be the best. I don’t care whether it’s education.
I’ve got a pet peeve about education, too. I believe that education is everybody’s
job and not just teachers, the principal, and the school. I’ve got a friend who’s the
assistant superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana. And I’ve stopped through there on
the way to Chicago a few years ago [unclear] program they have out there. They’ve got a
supplementary program to the education system out there, where they have pretty close to
a million dollars every year, because they have organized the parents, the teachers, the
students, the community organizations, the industries, all are a large community of about
twenty something[?] members. Even the unions are a part. And these companies
contributing, individuals contributing, and in the next ten years they hope to have ten
million dollars to supplement and enhance and enrich the program of the school.
Now I presented that to, down here to the--and asked them to explore and see
whether or not it would be feasible here in the city. The lady, that’d be--I forget who--
what’s the name of the lady who was--Sarah Beale[?]. She was the chairman of the
school board. She wrote a letter to the person who has charge to the city publicly. I
couldn’t ever get in contact with her and she never did call me, so I don’t know what
happened. But I believe that’s one way of getting parents, teachers, and all going in the
same direction.
[unclear] about us, we go all in different directions, too. Blacks have a tendency
to do that, and other groups, too, as far as I can see. They said at one time they had a
circus in Chicago and it was twenty-five cents to get to see something you’ve never seen
before. But when they opened up the curtain there was about ten people from the state
[unclear] each one holding the rope, pulling at the state. They all pulling that one thing,
all at the same time, pulling at the same thing. And that’s something they hadn’t seen
before. [laughs]
There’s a fable, too, about the mystic knights--had two rooms, and in those rooms
was a big pot with food in it, but they all had long-handled spoons. And in one room, the
guys were just falling off, they’d get so thin. But in the other room the other fellows were
looking healthy and getting better all the time. What was happening? Those in the other
room who were trying to feed themselves with the long handled spoon couldn’t get it in
the mouth. But in the other room, they had developed a technique. Each person was
feeding another person with the long handled spoon. So they had developed a technique
of cooperation--
WL: Working together.
RW: --and compassion and working with cooperation.
[End of Interview]

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1
GREENSBORO VOICES/GREENSBORO CIVIL RIGHTS ORAL HISTORY
COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Ralph Wooden
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: February 10, 1989
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
WILLIAM LINK: This is William Link and the date is February 10, 1989. I’m here in the
home of Mr. Ralph Wooden. Mr. Wooden, I wonder if you’d mind telling me where you
were born, when you were born, and how you came to come to Greensboro.
RALPH WOODEN: Yes, I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1915, Franklin County. And I came
to Greensboro after completing high school at Central High School in Columbus.
Graduated Central High School and [went] on an athletic scholarship to play football at
North Carolina A&T State University [A&T], which was at that time North Carolina
A&T College. I spent four years here on the football team, three years on the basketball
team. We won one championship when I was here in basketball in 1937.
I came in 1934 as a freshman. I completed my training in ’38, left A&T, and my
first job was in Hagerstown, Maryland. I spent a year there, and then I returned to
Greensboro in ’39 and worked at Woman’s College, which is now the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro, for a year, from ’39 to ’40 as a laboratory technician with
the Department of Physics--Psychology. And in leaving there I got an appointment to the
city school system in Greensboro at Dudley High School as an instructor in industrial
arts. And I stayed there a year and probably a month.
And [I] left in ’41 to go to Illinois, Chanute Field, Illinois, because at that time
they were just beginning to integrate blacks or to accept blacks into the air forces. Not as
integration, but as a part of the air forces--but a black squadron they were forming at that
time called the 99th Pursuit Squadron. And they were also training people to teach
ground school personnel, and we were taking training at Chanute Field.
WL: That was before--
RW: In 1941.
2
WL: --before Pearl Harbor.
RW: This was before Pearl Harbor. I went out in September 1941. Another young man by the
named Haywood Ware[?] preceded me out there. And there was--we were the first group
that was trained as ground school instructors in the air forces at Chanute Field, Illinois,
and Rantoul, Illinois.
WL: How--why were you attracted to the [U.S Army] Air Force, what made you want to join?
RW: We took--we went to the air forces, we were attracted because at that time, before that
blacks hadn’t had an opportunity to work in the air forces because of discrimination
against them. And they passed the Executive Order 8802, which was signed by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. And this provided us an opportunity to help our economic
situation a little better, too, because we were getting paid much more than we would have
been had we been teaching in public schools at that time.
WL: What kind of experiences did you have in the training camps and in the air bases?
RW: In the air bases, well, I was trained at Chanute Field as an aircraft propeller specialist.
And then I was transferred after that, after serving seventeen months at Chanute Field.
Transferred to Seymore Johnson Field in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for about three
months, because there the people didn’t take well to blacks teaching the whites in the air
forces, especially in Goldsboro. So that provided a different setting.
So we--I was transferred to New York, Rome, New York, Air Service Command
where I stayed until I was inducted into the service. That was in May, and I was inducted
into the service in September. The air forces, I was inducted into the Air Force after
working as a civilian in the air forces.
WL: You started out a civilian.
RW: I started out a civilian, yes.
WL: What was the attitude of the Air Force generally, [and] maybe specifically that the
officers corps--toward having--
RW: Well, now, we had some incidents that were--all right, for instance, when we were at
Chanute Field, the time we were there we had more and more blacks coming into the
ground school instructor program. And of course, the more you have, seemingly it caused
a little more concern on the parts of whites.
So they had, they had one time a white lady posted at lunch hour and had one of
3
our members who was eating his lunch and she said that he had approached her. And
come to find out, they laid him off and investigated. They found out that she was kind of
set up as a person to cause--by whites--to cause some confusion among the group. And of
course, he was rehired, he was re-put back on his job, reinstated, and returned to his job
and paid his back pay. Of course, she was discharged.
WL: She was--
RW: Discharged.
WL: Trying to get, provoke the disturbance?
RW: Yes. And in the meantime we had contacted the NAACP [National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People] in Chicago. Aaron Brown[?] was at that time the head
of the NAACP in Chicago. They wanted him [the man who was fired] to submit to a lie
detector’s test, but he did not have to do that because Aaron Brown suggested that he not
do so, that they didn’t have enough evidence to really provoke such a movement. So, and
then the secretary of war had J. Ernest Wilkins, who was his assistant, who was out of
Chicago--James [sic, Jesse] Wilkins, Sr. was assistant to the secretary of war, and
[prominent African American lawyers] Charles Houston and also Thurgood Marshall,
who was with the NAACP. So this caused quite a stir.
But the racial, subtle racialism, racism still existed at that time. And so they were
doing anything they could to provoke a disturbance if possible to kind of allay the fact
that we were going to be integrated.
WL: What sort of people were doing the provoking? I mean, what, who were the people that
didn’t want this change?
RW: Well, they had a number of people in the air forces and in the army and all of the services
who were from the South. It happened to be that the commanding officer of the base at
that time was from Texas, and he was removed from there and sent some place else and
replaced with somebody else as the commanding officer of the base, you see. And several
of the civilians who were there were transferred to other bases, you know, as a result of
that incident.
And then later on they said that they were going to integrate them in all the
facilities, so then they broke up a lot of the blacks and sent them to different places. I was
sent to Goldsboro, North Carolina, Seymore Johnson Field. Stayed there three, three
months. When we first got there they wanted us to strip airplanes down for parts, but we
didn’t agree with that because that wasn’t our job. We had a different M.O. spec [military
occupational specialty]. So we wanted--
4
WL: That wasn’t your training.
RW: Yeah, we had the training, we had the experience and teaching in the classroom. So we
held out, and we eventually were put in the classrooms. But the people in the city heard
about that, as well as some on the base. And of course, they didn’t like that. So they were
going to, they moved us out of Goldsboro. And I was one of the two or three of us who
went to New York. Some others went other places--Wright Field out in Dayton, Ohio,
some went up to Massachusetts, some went to Texas, different places over the United
States. So we had, we had quite an experience.
Now I got back to New York and I was working up there in training. And I went
down to Patterson, New Jersey, for a six-weeks training course in electric propellers at
Curtiss Wright [Corporation], and after two weeks down there I was called into the
service.
So I went back to base--my wife was also working up there--and reported. And I
was sent to the reception center after a twenty-one day furlough. I had to camp up to
Long Island, New York. I had nine weeks there, and I passed all, everything with flying
colors, got my clothes sent home, and my G.I. issue. And after about nine days, nine to
twelve days at the center, I was shipped down to Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training.
And after completing basic training down there in, what, nineteen forty--that was
in 1943. In 1944, January 1944, I was assigned to Daniel Field, Augusta, Georgia. And I
remained at Daniel Field, Augusta, Georgia, not as an instructor, but just waiting
assignment for a year and never did receive assignment until ’44. I went to Atterbury Air
Base and then was assigned to a bomb group which was supposed to have been trained in
Columbus, Indiana, at Freeman Field. But we had trouble with racism down there in
southern Indiana, which was equally as intense, and I might say, as equally as, it
displayed itself equally as well in southern Illinois as it did in southern Indiana.
So southern Indiana, then we went to--we were transferred out of there because
we didn’t get along, we weren’t compatible. And we went down to Godman Field,
Kentucky, in the air base down there and we were going to form our 477th bomber group
since we already had two fighter groups, the 99th pursuit squadron and the 332nd pursuit
squadron.
And [General] Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., came to organize the bomber group which
was going to the East. But the bombs fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and that ended the
war. And of course, they deactivated the black bomber group, 477th bomber group, and
we were sent different places. And I was one in the group that was sent to Tuskegee,
Alabama, and I remained there in Tuskegee, Alabama, until I got enough points. At that
time they would discharge you on based on points. I got enough points to be discharged
in December, and also I was discharged into the veterans facility in Dayton, Ohio, which
is near Columbus. I stayed there a month. Then I came out and entered Ohio State
5
[University].
WL: Did you consider staying in the air force at all?
RW: I never considering staying in the [U.S] Army, in the air forces, not as--no. Not as a
career. Not after the experiences I’d had as a civilian and in the air force.
WL: So it was sufficiently negative?
RW: Right. I wasn’t sufficiently--because I was, I guess I was the type of guy that liked to be a
little creative. In the air forces and in government service, everything is passed down to
you. And you do what is passed down to you, you see, orders. And you can’t do things on
your own in terms of creativeness. And that kind of fenced me in. I’m not the kind of
person who takes fencing in too well.
WL: How did they handle the day-to-day kind of segregation having, you know, white air
force people and black air force people, say for example, in meals and social activities?
Did the air force--separated all the time?
RW: We were all separated. The blacks were all on one side of the railroad track, where the
coal yard was, and the whites were on the other side. And they had a white dining hall
and black dining halls, white unit squadrons and black squadrons. It was segregated. And
I took the examination for Officer’s Candidate School and never did hear from them in
Georgia. Never did hear from them.
WL: Officers were white?
RW: Officers were white.
WL: Were there any black officers?
RW: Had some black officers, but most commanding officers, top officers, were white.
WL: How did white officers relate to black servicemen? I mean, was there--
RW: Well, they always had a first sergeant that they could handle, and they always had him as
a go-between.
WL: Mediator.
6
RW: Yeah, he was in between. And the officers, you didn’t never see them. You’d see them,
but you didn’t never come in contact with them in terms of functions of the air forces or
anything. You see, it was always passed down, the orders--they called them orders--were
passed down. We--that was the way it was.
After, of course, after that, I went back to school, in ’46. That was in ’45 I got
discharged. And in ’46 I went back to school, Ohio State. Remained in school until I
received my master’s degree in education, industrial arts education, at Ohio State.
WL: Did you--
RW: And then I came to A&T in ’47, January of ’47. I went back to finish up my master’s and
came back to work with a former instructor who was ill at the time with terminal cancer.
And he passed, I guess it must have been around April or May. April, I guess, of that
year, ’47.
WL: Did you notice at this point, during the war and right after the war, let’s say, you know,
’42 to about ’47, that there seemed to be any sense that things were changing at all, I
mean in terms of race relations?
RW: During that time the image of the two fighter groups was so popular, because they had
done a terrific job in Italy and the European theatre, that the attitude of some people were
changing at that time. Yes, to some extent. But that wasn’t a general pattern, that was just
in certain, I guess you’d say certain areas. But not a general pattern.
WL: When you came back to Greensboro, did you notice any change? I mean as a student--I
guess as a student you don’t normally notice things as much as when you work at a place.
RW: You don’t notice, no. When I came back to Greensboro the pattern hadn’t changed too
much. I don’t know whether you call war a normal situation or not, but attitudes were
changing, but--for instance, when I went to do my graduate work, I couldn’t go to a
school in North Carolina because they weren’t training blacks for terminal degrees. So I
had to go out of state, and they paid me the differential between what it cost me to go out
of the state and what it would to stay, which is about six hundred dollars for a calendar
year.
I went for a calendar year rather than a school year. I went September to
September, September ’49 to September ’50. I went and worked on my doctorate. And
then I just did my research over a period of four or five years, because I worked. And so I
just took the time to do my research within the time limit. And I completed that and I
completed my master’s--my doctorate in ’56 at [Ohio] State. But at that time you
couldn’t go to a graduate school for a terminal degree in North Carolina and most of the
7
places in the South.
WL: How would you characterize the way things were in Greensboro in, say--
RW: At that time?
WL: Well, based on what you remember when you first came.
RW: Yeah, well, we had separate facilities that we--and there was a lot that needed to be done.
And, of course, you know about February 1, 1960, when the four freshman students from
A&T went down and sat at the counter downtown.
WL: Woolworth’s.
RW: But we had one mail carrier, black mail carrier. Now some places they had mail carriers a
long time ago, but here--and that was Charles Fairley, who was the first mail carrier in
the city. And so it began to move. He did a good job and then they hired some more, and
like that. But it was a slow process, you know.
The eating facilities were still separated. You’d go downtown and the seating in
the theatres was segregated, not only here but also in Illinois.
WL: Oh, was it?
RW: Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyhow, in Illinois, when we were out there as civilians, we went, three
of us went downtown to go to the theatre. And we got tickets and we sat up, down on the
first floor. And they invited us up to a balcony, we called it pigeon roost. And we said no.
And so we went out and got refunds. That was Vincent Gill and his wife, and my wife,
myself, and somebody else. I don’t know whether it was Wade [Wayne?] Wilson or not.
Wade eventually became president of Chaney. But there were three of us. Yeah, yeah. So
it was segregated. You couldn’t eat in a restaurant up there.
WL: Just couldn’t eat at all?
RW: No. There was a lady who had a place that she would feed us in her place, a black lady.
WL: And that was it?
RW: That was it. But, yeah.
WL: How--what kind of feelings did you have, you know, in facing this kind of situation as a
8
young person, in movie theaters and--
RW: I tell you what, it taught me that whenever you’re in a situation like that and you have--
especially in training--you have to be among the best. In other words, you can see that
you need to have quality and excellence, and you had to work hard to do that. And you
had to be better than a lot of people in the same situation. So you couldn’t be anything
but quality, because you’d wash out, attrition, moving away, you see.
WL: Coming from Ohio, did you notice coming to Greensboro--what sort of differences did
you notice?
RW: Not too much difference. It was segregated out there, too. I couldn’t go to the theatre
downtown. I went to school downtown and I’d pass by theatres that I couldn’t go.
WL: But your school was integrated, was that right?
RW: School was integrated.
WL: High school was integrated.
RW: Yeah. Well, the reason for that is we had more blacks than we had whites [laughs], and
Italians and Germans and Irishmen. We were all there together and more of us than the
others.[unclear] So we didn’t have any trouble in school. You’d go downtown there and
you--and my wife went downtown and they wouldn’t let her try a hat on.
WL: Couldn’t walk in the store?
RW: That’s right. So we had segregation out there.
WL: And nothing new when you came down here. Same thing here.
RW: No. My grandmother lived in southern Ohio. I used to go down there, there was
segregation down there.
WL: Was--what kind of role did A&T play? I mean--
RW: In my life?
WL: Well, in your life [both laugh] or in the Greensboro community.
9
RW: A&T always has played an important aspect in the Greensboro community to the extent
that it’s accepted. I guess they’re playing a greater part now, because there’s been
somewhat, well, somewhat integration’s taken over it. Not all together, even now. But
economically, I think that’s played a very important aspect of it. Because when you have
these schools, they generate a lot of money in a community. Not only that, but you get a
different kind of person, human being, too, and that’s very important.
WL: Leaders.
RW: Yes, leaders and this type of thing, you see. And a lot of people from A&T have served
on commissions and committees in the city and have served on the city council. They
served on the--they were--Zoe Barbee was the first one who was supposed to have served
on the county commission, but she was killed in an automobile accident before she got to
serve. Katie Dorsett is on there now. And then they appointed Mr. Hall who is on there,
Bert Hall who’s serving on there.
You had a number who served on school boards, zoning commissions, selective
service board, and on down the line. We’ve also had a number serving on political action
committees. My participation was the political action committee and the Greensboro
Citizens Association, which was an organization formed basically between the
community and instructors and people from Bennett College and A&T College in the
beginning. And--
WL: When was it organized, first organized?
RW: I don’t remember the history of it. I don’t remember. But it was, [both speaking] I guess
it was organized around the fifties, later fifties, somewhere around in there, something
around there I imagine. And of course, they did a lot of things in terms of [TV turned on
in the background, recorder paused]--they did a lot of things in terms of lobbying against
the grocery stores, in terms of employment, you know. In other words, don’t buy here if
they don’t employ us--
WL: Boycotts.
RW: --don’t spend your money.
WL: Yeah. When was that going on, do you remember?
RW: That’s around the fifties, too. Reverend [Otis] Hairston [of Shiloh Baptist Church] was
very active in that. Reverend [Julius] Douglas also was with the [St. James] Presbyterian
Church at the time. And a number of ministers were active in that movement--I think
10
Prince Graves [of St. James Baptist Church]. And [Dr.] George Simkins, of course, has
been a leading--a leader in the community, a member of the NAACP. Before his time, it
was [Edwin] Edmonds was before his time, and, of course, [Fred?] Battle since his time.
But they were--the NAACP has done a job, a wonderful job, in terms of voter
registration, education, these types things.
I was also precinct chairman--Precinct 8, which is up here at Gillespie Park
School--for about five years. A pretty large precinct at that time. It went all the way over
across [Highway] 29, over into eastern Greensboro, over in the Bluford area. But they cut
it down later on, they made it small.
When we moved out here we got a letter under the door saying that they wanted to
preserve this area for whites, so to speak. We still have a copy of that letter.
WL: Who’d the letter come from? Who wrote the letter?
RW: I think it was a guy named Hood. I believe it was some Hood, I forget now. But we have
a copy of it. My wife can show you. It’s in the file. And there were whites across the
street, one black family on the other side who was out here before we were. She was a
Hampton at that time, she’s a Barrow[?] now. And then Mr. Merrill who lived in the next
to the last house on this row here. But all across the street was white. But we got along
with the people well. And the family who lived here were the Mitchells.
Now we could not get this house financed by a bank in Greensboro.
WL: Because of its location? Because it was a white neighborhood?
RW: Yes. But the Mitchells had a large family. And one of the sons, who is now passed--and
he had a daughter who worked at North Carolina National Bank, who was a teller, a Ms.
Wilkins--he was a dealer in Cadillac and Oldsmobile in his place on Peachtree Street in
Atlanta. We got this house financed, after our down payment, through Atlanta. He got it,
he arranged the deal for his family. And they wanted us to have the house, because Mrs.
Mitchell liked my wife and my daughter at the time, and she said she would like for the
house, for us to get the house. And we wouldn’t get the house unless we got the lot next
door too, incidentally. So that’s the way we got this house.
Now of course, after the founding of the Greensboro National Bank and the
American Federal Savings and Loan, then the picture changed. You could start getting
them then. But you see, it took that to get it. So later on we had it transferred from down
there to American Federal Savings and Loan. But we could not get this house financed.
WL: Banks would just not accept--
RW: --for a loan. And I think they had a limit on how much they were going to loan blacks,
11
fifteen thousand dollars. You couldn’t buy houses for that, you know, or you could some
houses. But they weren’t doing much.
WL: So no matter where the house was, they just wouldn’t lend a certain amount to you.
RW: They wouldn’t let--especially in a white neighborhood. Now when they integrated the
schools up here, there was a man who marched with a KKK [Ku Klux Klan] flag on cross
of an American flag, which made it illegal. And they integrated the schools. Our kids
were one of the first ones up here at Gillespie Park school to integrate the school. They
were one of the first blacks in that school at that time.
WL: How did that go? What--how smooth was it?
RW: It went smooth. There weren’t any, there weren’t--
[recorder malfunction]--cooperation from the parents in the public schools. You
may do all right, but you can do much better with the cooperation.
WL: Why was there reluctance to participate in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association]?
RW: Well, they were just apathetic, as they are now. Still persists, it still persists. You’ve got a
lot of people, I guess they’re tired or apathetic or something, who don’t participate in the
school programs, even though they have plenty of time. I don’t know, but it seem like
they are glad to get rid of the children and put them in the schools so they won’t have to
be bothered.
WL: Won’t be bothered anymore.
RW: Yeah. But you still have a responsibility to your children.
WL: Yep. Let’s get back to politics a minute.
RW: All right, get back to politics.
WL: I wonder if you could say a little bit about how well the, how well or how badly the
political system in Greensboro represented the black community back, let’s say, in the
fifties or sixties.
RW: Well, in the fifties and sixties it was a matter of divide and conquer. They had the blacks
divided up. We had some blacks who were for certain people and certain ideals and
things they wanted, and another group. And later on it became a little more organized, but
12
they still have these splinter groups, and that diluted the effectiveness of your vote.
WL: What were the divisions based on?
RW: Well, sometimes it was just on emotions. They liked the fellow or they knew the fellow
back when, and he’s running for office, so we--or at one time, it was all the blacks voted
all democrat all the time. But later on it started changing and sometimes they would vote
for the person rather than the party, you see. It’s hard to get people to realize the strategy
in that, you see.
So we had a mixture of political actions, reactions, and responses. We had a dense
mixture that was really interesting. And we had different people emerging as a result of
that, in terms of what you might say leadership--and they got out tickets and these kinds
of things, you know, to inform people as to who to vote for, had to give them rides to the
polls, and these type things, you see.
WL: Was there a lot of voting? Were the numbers of blacks voting increasing?
RW: Well, we began, we began to vote more, because the NAACP put a great effort in
education and getting out and registration. We put a lot of work into that. A lot of work
needs to be done now in that area. But they did a lot, a whale of a job in that, you see.
WL: Any--was there much of in the way of problems in terms of registration--
RW: Well, we had some problems, yeah.
WL: --in terms of city officials or--?
RW: Well, we had some problems in that, because they said that some of the people weren’t
registered as they should have been. But on the whole we had a very effective registration
program. Sometimes we had it on the weekends, and we’d get students who, they could
cover more ground than the adults can in a shorter period of time, you know. So we’d get
students, and then we’d give them a meal or something, volunteers. But it was good
training for them. And it gave them insight into the political system, you know.
And then we followed, we followed up, and we’d go to Raleigh sometimes. On a
number of occasions I’ve been to Raleigh to represent the political action committee and
some of the things that we were looking for there. But we didn’t, we hadn’t yet gotten
enough commitment from people. We ought to get commitment from people on things
that we are trying to do, if they’re going to do it.
But now the money has gotten involved, so that they do for the people who give
them the money. They’re lobbyists, all these kinds of people, people feeding them, and
13
people giving them drinks, and a little bit of everything going on. And so they are loyal to
the people who seem to have the money. I don’t know how that works. That works at all
levels.
WL: Yeah, that’s the way the system works now.
RW: Yeah. You almost have to be a millionaire now to get involved in this.
WL: To run for office.
RW: Even at the local level it’s expensive. You run for mayor now and see if you don’t have
to spend some money.
WL: Yeah, yeah. Does--how well did the city government represent the black community do
you think, or serve the black community?
RW: They were very, they were very, very difficult to work with. We--they didn’t want black
representation on the city council. And they had an at-large system, and we had to work
on that. I worked on that for dividing the county into districts so we can have
representation from the county.
And if you go back over a period of years, we didn’t have anybody up there to
represent, I guess you’d say the black community, but to represent Greensboro, because
most of our people were broad enough people not only to represent the district they’re in,
but also to be interested in their city as a whole, the progress of the city.
We still have some difficulty in that. So we have now party differential, so we get
more Republicans than Democrats or more Democrats than Republicans. They kind of
rule the roost.
WL: In the county government, yeah.
RW: Yeah, especially in the county government. City government’s not--it’s supposed to be
nonpartisan. But I imagine it’s a little bit partisanship in that, if you look behind the
scenes you can see it.
WL: How about city services back, let’s say, in the fifties? Did--
RW: Well, we still need a lot of sidewalks over this way. We worked on that to some extent,
we got it paved down Willow Road, and sidewalks, and that was when I was working
with the--and Mr. [Vance] Chavis and all of us were working with the city on getting
sidewalks and paved streets. We have gotten some, but we’re still short on sidewalks.
14
Kids going to school--of course, they been busing lately and they haven’t had much
trouble. But when they were walking to school, neighborhood school--
WL: Walk in the streets?
RW: Yes, they would walk in the streets, you see, which is a dangerous thing now. Somebody
can come along and knock you out in a minute. Then, we didn’t have drugs at that time to
the extent that we have them now. I don’t know, we may have had them but we didn’t
know anything about it at that time. Now we’ve got neighborhoods with sections of them
infested with drugs. And that brings on another problem, and the schools are infested
with it. And that brings on another problem that doesn’t seem right to me.
The local level and the state level have enough money to do anything about the
war on drugs, which is part of politics. And the people who have the money, buying the
homes in the neighborhoods, polluting the neighborhoods with crime and so forth. People
who have money, people who have money are people who are selling drugs.
WL: Did--what sort of effect do you think the city--
RW: And then, we--too, housing. Now all the housing projects are over here, most of them.
Might have one out there, might have one going out northwest Greensboro. We have
three over here I know about. And you get a lot of people living too close together,
especially if they’re low income people, you have problems, you know. And they get in a
cycle and they never get out of it. And then here comes another children, another set of
children. They get in the same cycle. It’s self perpetuating.
So we need some other kind of a system that’s going to help our people to get
themselves out of poverty. Some kind of way--training, training, day care centers for
children so they can train. And they can go into jobs, skilled jobs, that will--where they
can earn enough to move themselves out of poverty. But they have this problem with the
single family parents.
WL: Do you think that city services have gotten better over time? I mean--
RW: I think they have, the quality of them has improved. But I’m not so sure that what they’re
doing is the kind of thing that’s going to help alleviate poverty and a lot of things in life. I
think that sometimes it perpetuates problems. I think there’s some things happening now
in our system that’s cosmetic, rather than remedial and having a permanent effect,
alleviate the situation. I think that’s-- you take the more children you have, the more
money you get for dependency. So having children becomes a big business. I can’t get a
job, I don’t have any training, don’t have any skills. If I do have skills, I can get a job.
I had the same thing in housing. We really don’t have adequate housing for our
15
people. And that is something that has to be addressed one way or the other. And all this
ties in with politics, because the laws, and the policies, and the things that are set by
politicians. The guidelines, the objectives are set by, primarily by, politicians. And of
course, the politicians are not controlled by the people who don’t have money. They’re
controlled by the people--and not necessarily by people who voted for them--but by the
people who supported them in their campaign for money to run for office. That’s the
system. That’s the cannibalistic system.
We do have some people who have empathy and compassion and want to look
for, find a better society than Mr. Bush [unclear]. But we don’t have enough of them.
And the laws and the bills that they’re passing will enhance the few at the expense
[laughs] of the majority.
WL: Let’s--maybe we can talk about, a little bit about the activism of the 1960s. You
mentioned already the sit-in at Woolworth’s, and of course, a couple years later in 1963
you have massive demonstrations.
RW: Yeah, Martin Luther King’s movement.
WL: Right. Did that come sort of out of nowhere or did--could you see it coming at the time?
RW: Well, certain incidents did bring that about. Of course, you know, out in Arkansas, you
know, they had the school desegregation.
WL: Little Rock.
RW: Right, Little Rock, if you remember. That was just a little drop in the bucket, but it made
a ripple on the water. And then there were several other incidents, I can’t remember all of
them now. But I know there are some things happening that did make ripples on the
water, and later on the water became disturbed. I guess they give Rosa Parks and her
refusal to get in the back of the bus a majority of credit in that area. It just happened to,
that that little seed began to germinate and it began to move into the civil rights
movement.
WL: It affected things here, too, as well.
RW: Yes, it did.
WL: People saw those things happening.
RW: Well, when they got the law passed about transportation facilities and public
16
accommodations [Civil Rights Act of 1964], it affected everybody. But you know some
of the fantasies and some of the fiction that they wrote about what was going to happen
after certain people got public accommodations and things didn’t ever come about,
because they said that--and for a location of your house, you know, where you live--they
said if you put blacks in there, it’s going to lower the value of my property. And it never
come about. And sometimes they would raise the value, most instances.
And also these people said that they’d lose customers. In fact, one man closed his
cafe down here, Mayfair cafe. Boyd Morris closed it down before he would integrate.
They had a S&W up here and a K&W out there, and they had, of course, other places,
too. But most of these people [unclear], they’re glad to see you come, because of the
dollar--all of them are the same color. They didn’t know where it came from after they go
through the cash register and the computer.
WL: Did that sort of attitude change real quickly?
RW: No, it was a gradual movement, gradual. People have to be educated, and they have to
see. And strangely enough, they have to see what is it doing for me, you know,
personally. They make it a personal matter. Not for my brothers and sisters, but what is it
doing for me? And if it’s making more money for me, I’m all for it.
WL: Do you think that’s what people like Boyd Morris were most concerned about, that they
were fearful--
RW: They were fearful that--
WL: --lose all their business?
RW: If blacks would come in, no whites would come, and the blacks couldn’t support the
business. And they’d go out of business, because they didn’t have money, you see, to
support it. But, though whenever you did have money, if you’re going to spend it, it
didn’t make any difference. I go out to K&W and other places now, to the motion picture
theatres and sit where we want to, to the parks, to the golf courses. It doesn’t make a bit
of difference. Nobody pays any attention, and because life goes on and those storms and
life goes on.
Even the church is trying to integrate. That’s a remarkable thing, because at one
time, you know, that was the most segregated hour--on Sunday, at eleven o’clock--in the
history of the world. Eleven o’clock services, all white, all black. My church is all black,
and now we have people, white people coming to our church, some joining. And black
people go to other churches and they’re joining.
17
WL: You think that’s changing?
RW: Now there’s certain things that integration did, and that was it did not provide enough
slots for blacks to assume leadership roles. When you got in there you were just there.
You, at that time, you didn’t--when it first started out, you were not student body
president of a school. In fact, you did well to be on the student council. If you’re on there,
you’d be probably the only one on there, or two or one more.
And they have a lot of that going on now. They have a lot of places where they
point to one black and say, “We’re integrated.” Oh no, you aren’t. You’re a tokenism.
You’re not integrated, by any means. But they try to hide behind that, and that isn’t good.
I think we need to open up--
WL: You think that’s happened at all?
RW: --our values, our value system. We need to get our value system lined up. Now if you’re
going to have war, and let you get out there and fight, and get shot, or go and come back,
we ain’t going to let you get to that dollar. And they aren’t going to let blacks get too
much money. If you get too much money, there’re going to try to find out something and
some way to get you out of that money, either accuse you of something or something,
you see. But they aren’t going to let you get but so much.
Now you know the wealth of the country is in the hands of a few people, most of
the wealth. There ain’t but a few people. That’s the reason they don’t like the Jews,
because the Jews have the skills to accumulate funds, money. In a capitalistic society
[laughs], that counts a lot.
WL: What--going back to the late 50s and 1960s, what kind of atmosphere did you have at
A&T? It must have been a kind of an unusual place to be.
RW: In the fifties and sixties?
WL: And sixties. Here the four students at Woolworth’s are all from A&T, a lot of the
leadership in the 1960s, all of the leadership really, I guess, or most of it was from A&T.
Jesse Jackson’s at A&T. It must have been, you know, kind of a dynamic place, a lot of
the things going on.
RW: There was a lot of things happening and--but they tied in with the community, too. The
community supported them as much as they could in the marches. And the attitude of the
people began to change to a great extent, too.
Now all the white people weren’t against the civil rights. There were a lot who
were for it.
18
WL: Such as?
RW: Well, you had fellows down here in Philadelphia, Mississippi. There were only two
whites down there and one black, and there was a white woman killed down there too.
There were a lot of ministers, white ministers, who fought for us, see. So we had a lot of--
and we had that here in the city. Yeah, we had a lot of white people that marched with the
blacks for civil rights.
But the majority of who were in office and power structure weren’t for it. Kind of
shook up the power structure. People got arrested, had so many of them they couldn’t put
all of them in the jails. So they put them down here some place on East Market Street in a
little abandoned [polio] hospital down here. So--they went to jail for it. A lot people lost
their life. Of course, we had the Ku Klux Klan, you know, it was out here. Most of those
guys were white, who were fighting the Ku Klux Klan.
WL: You mean by the shooting? [at the November 1979 KKK-Communist Workers Party riot]
RW: Yes, by the shooting. Yeah, they had a shooting out there, you see.
WL: Was--were you at A&T during the famous visit of the Governor Luther Hodges?
RW: Yeah, I was in there, sure.
WL: Were you, do you remember that?
RW: He couldn’t pronounce Negro. He got mixed up on his pronunciation and enunciation.
And Dr. [Ferdinand D.] Bluford was the president at that time.
We had a hectic year, that year was 1955. My wife was president of the faculty,
ladies faculty club. And we lost a bursar who was found misplacing veterans funds. We
lost a lady, Jean Spinner, who was the dean of women, who had an abortion and died as a
result. And eventually the bursar passed. He lost [unclear]. Went to Goldsboro. He had
sugar diabetes and he passed, Mr. Webster.
Then we had the incident in the fall at our Founder’s Day, when Governor
Hodges came to speak and the students rumbled their feet, rrr-rrr-rrr. And he stopped and
looked at the president. They had told the president not to bring him there.
WL: The students did?
RW: Yes, the students, student government. And students stood behind him, and “rum-rum-rum-
rum.” And he stopped and looked around. You could tell he was very much
19
disturbed. And then he would speak again and he used the word negra-- I don’t know he
said negra or negroid--whatever it was, it wasn’t right. And the students didn’t go along
with that. Rrr-rrr. They went rrr-rum. So he managed to finish up, but when he finished
up he walked out and he never did come back. And the president tried to write an
apology, a letter of apology for him, but I don’t think he accepted that.
And so the president passed in December of ’55. So we had a very, that was a
very, that was the roughest year of my thirty-three and a half years at A&T that we had.
The roughest. I was a pallbearer for Dr. Bluford. And so, yes, I remember that. And, well,
we didn’t have, we weren’t in good favor with the governor at that time. Of course, he
wasn’t in good favor with us either. [laughs]
WL: Well, I guess there was some perception that you were a bunch of troublemakers there, I
guess.
RW: Yes, in a way. At that time, yes. But A&T has always been a school where we get a
mixture of people from all over the country and out of foreign countries, too. And it all
depends on who’s looking at it as to whether you’re a troublemaker or whether you’re not
just going to let somebody come in and walk all over you. All that. It’s in the eye of the
beholder, you know, the perspective that you have. And so I always looked at it as we’re
not going to let anybody--being a graduate of the institution, too--we aren’t going to let
anyone walk over us.
We had two or three strikes when I was in school--food strike.
WL: Oh, really?
RW: Students, yeah. Oh my goodness, we went away, the football team went away to play
ball. We’d gone on a northern trip up in Pennsylvania at the Lincoln University, and
Howard [University], and Hampton [University], and we went away for one week. And
came back and the students were seen going home. Some of them had gone home
already, because there weren’t satisfied with the meals they had been receiving in the
dining hall, so they struck. And they didn’t let us stay there that night. They took us out.
And one of our coaches from up here, South Boston, Virginia. I don’t know if you’ve
ever heard of South Boston or not.
WL: Yeah, sure. Halifax County.
RW: But you go to go up that way, you go up to South Boston on up to Richmond that way,
[U.S. Highway] 360, around there. Okay. And we spent a week up there before we played
our Thanksgiving game, because we played North Carolina Central [University] and we
were great rivals at that time, and we always played on Thanksgiving. And we didn’t do
20
anything but practice in the fairground. They got new tubs, and cooked up that good
country food and we got strong as bulls. [both laugh] We, we slept. You couldn’t get out
any place, because there wasn’t any place to go. And the crickets were hollering and
going on around there.
And we stayed at different homes in that community, because he had been
principal up there so he knew the people that accommodated us. And we’d take the old
bus. We had a bus, the door wasn’t on too well, we’d just take some haywire. And they
called us the little country boys, farm boys, because A&T was an agriculture school, you
see. [laughs] And they’d see us coming to some of these urban schools and they’d be
hollering out the windows, “Farm boy!” I don’t know, but when we left they knew we
weren’t all farm boys! [laughs]
So we came back and played on Thanksgiving day at A&T, down at the stadium.
And we beat, we beat them terrible. [laughs]
WL: But this was after the school had been closed?
RW: This was after the school--well, this was--well, the school was half closed, because some
of the kids could go home at that time. But the boys would go out to the city and hustle
up food and money and bring those girls food and stuff at the dormitory. Oh, yeah, yeah.
One guy, we called him Roast. He went in some lady’s house and she had a roast. He put
it under his hat and walked out [unclear]. Took it to the girls in the dormitory, feed them,
oh yes. Yes, that’s A&T. That’s the A&T spirit. That’s the real spirit. Of course, A&T is
known for that.
I wasn’t surprised. I was right across the hall from the newspaper, and the
newspaper knew what was going on. I knew they were going to go down there February
1, 1960, that these four boys were going down there.
WL: You knew about it in advance?
RW: Knew about it, yes. One of them’s father lived right around the corner.
WL: Did they receive a lot--obviously they received a lot of support.
RW: Oh, they got all kinds of support, yeah, yeah. Ideas too. Yeah. We had some faculty
members, sociologists, that’d work with them. They’d come back for consultation. And
then after while it just picked up momentum. What do you call it when you roll those
balls and it picks up stuff as it goes along?
WL: Snowball.
21
RW: [laughs] It just snowballed [laughs] to a big movement. They heard about it other places
and it started here and here, and it went all over the world. We had people calling us from
California who were our friends wondering what’s going on in Greensboro. “It’s on the
news this evening that Greensboro’s in an uproar, there’s something terrible going on.”
We’d say, “We’re doing all right.” Well, they said, “It’s on the T.V.”
Mary Esther[?] who’s up in Canada now--we hear from every Christmas week--
she’s the one I heard from that we made friends with out in Illinois, and she called. She
had moved. She was a principal up there. She moved down to California, and she called
us. We had relatives in Mississippi and in Detroit, all over the country calling us
wondering what’s happening, wanting to know how we were getting along.
WL: If you’re surviving.
RW: We were out--
[End of Tape 1, Side A--Begin Tape 2, Side B]
RW: One of the things--of course, a lot of the civil rights leaders were lost. But I think it can, it
served to some extent to get us unified, to see--especially Dr. King’s movement--to see
the power of unity and nonviolence, and that you don’t always have to have money to
have power. I think sometimes it’s better not to have money, because you get so
concentrating on your money so you forget about what you’re about, you know.
So I believe that you don’t have to have power, you have to have a spirit. Maybe
you call him Jesus, whatever you want to call it. I believe that has to be there, because
you can’t kill that spirit. You can kill the individual but you can’t kill the spirit. Because
you can’t see him, he’s everywhere, you can’t get at him. So I think you have to have the
spirit, a spirit of good over evil.
And in some religions, of course, they call it, they said the good will win over
evil, because man has within him battleground. He’s constantly fighting evil with good,
good with evil. Whichever [unclear] wins, there’s got to be some good or it can’t win. So
I don’t know. There’s a spirit.
And I think that’s true of A&T.
EP: How long did that--
RW: It’s unique to A&T, because you don’t have guys coming out there like--and girls, too.
We’ve got some women who are very, very--Elleree[?], I don’t know if you know Elleree
Alexander Rossi[?], she was the first black woman graduate of Columbia University in
law. She’s an A&T graduate. She’s here in the city. She’s a republican, an interesting
person. She’s got a book, What It Means to Be Free. That’d be an interesting piece of
22
literature to read. She’s one of our friends. My wife and she talk until two o’clock in the
morning, I’m sleep [unclear]. She’s a graduate of A&T.
They’ve got some outstanding people. At one time you wouldn’t have known they
were going to do what they’re doing. When I was in the air corps you didn’t hear about
any of them. You didn’t hear about Jesse Jackson. But we got some other people, too,
across the country doing great things.
WL: Did--you mentioned that there was a great sense of unity--
RW: Yeah, I believe that’s one of the things that came out, but we haven’t explored it yet, we
haven’t developed it to its fullest maturity. We need unity as much as anything else.
WL: I was going to ask if you thought it had survived.
RW: It has survived to some extent, but we still have a long ways to go in unity. Now the
whites don’t get too much concerned until they get blacks working together. Then they
get concerned. If they can keep you divided up and arguing with each other and fighting
each other and that kind of thing, then they are happy because they’ve got you then.
You’re weak.
But if you can unify like Malcolm X said--we need to support ourselves, and we
need to stop crying so much about what the other guy’s going give us all the time. Let’s
get out and work for it and get it. Let’s not look for everything to be given to us. We want
our share, but let’s work for it too. And let’s work together to get it. No, we aren’t
concerned about who’s going to get the credit and all that kind of business. That don’t
amount up to a hill of beans. Who’s--what going to be the results overall, over a long
period of time. And I think that’s a much more viable program and movement than going
at it individually, a little bit here and a little bit there.
WL: What do you think that the most amazing--
RW: And another thing, we need to get involved, too. We need to get involved. We need to get
people in Congress, positions all up and down the line or across the board.
WL: What do you think the best way will be for blacks to increase power? You mentioned that
one of the things that needs to be done perhaps is to diversify political affiliation with one
party. What other-- [unclear--both talking]
RW: Well, that’s one possibility there, but we need to get our people more interested in voting,
going to the polls, and voting and voting their convictions. They have to go there and
vote intelligently, you know. Vote for the ones who are, who say they’re going to get it
23
right, do right, and if they don’t do right, vote them out.
At one time, I remember I was teaching up in Maryland. They used to give them a
drink of beer and tell them--a guy used to put a beer party on and tell them to vote for
him. And after the beer party was over and they voted for him, that was it. They didn’t
get anything as a result. No remuneration at all. So you’ve got to watch that kind of
business. You can’t sell yourself down the river for a slug of beer or a sandwich.
WL: Do you think--I talked to a number of people in Greensboro about race relations in the
last thirty or forty years. Some people are very optimistic, they think things have gotten a
lot better. Some people are pessimistic, they think things have stayed the same or gotten
worse. Other people are sort of in between. Where would you put yourself?
RW: We still have to fight for what we get. We still have to fight in Greensboro. Everything
blacks get in Greensboro, they have to fight for. Everything. I can’t think of one thing
that has been improved that we didn’t have to go down there and fight and fight and fight.
I wrote a proposal for the county district system and they turned it down, but they
finally had to come back to it. Mr. [Forrest] Campbell was the chairman at that time. It
didn’t please him so he didn’t even bring it up, he just ignored it. He was the one that
appointed the committee. [laughs] He wanted you to do something that he, he approved
of and we didn’t do that. I didn’t. So he didn’t, he just ignored it. But finally he had to
come back to it, because the Justice Department [unclear] said we had to have a kind of
district system that was going to ensure that we had a black on the county commissioners.
We had to fight for it. Everything we got, we had to fight for.
Now it looks like civil rights is being set back a little bit by the decision of the
Supreme Court in terms of quotas. They don’t like that quota business. I don’t know, but
we did make some progress with quotas, but since they’re not constitutional we had to
find a way to keep balance with our quotas. I don’t know how, but I believe there’s a
way. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I believe there is a way that we can keep surveillance on the picture of
employment and other things, too, to the extent that we can tell how much is going here,
how much is going there, and how much is going here, and so forth. And we’ve got
computers now and technology to do that. And if they want to be fair, then they can keep
an account--I guess you call it accountability. There’s not a difference [unclear], on the
overall picture, accountability, what’s going on, and we want to keep balance as much as
possible.
They claimed that they awarded somebody the food stamp appropriation even
though they were hired [unclear] somebody else, but that doesn’t mean anything if you’re
going to get that quality. Now if you’re going to bid low, there’s less quality. I’d rather
pay a little bit more and get quality if the program’s that way. I don’t know, but somehow
or other we’re going to have to--and everybody’s going to have to measure up. I don’t
24
care what color you are, you’re going to have to measure up. So in other words, whatever
you offer, it’s going to have to be the best. I don’t care whether it’s education.
I’ve got a pet peeve about education, too. I believe that education is everybody’s
job and not just teachers, the principal, and the school. I’ve got a friend who’s the
assistant superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana. And I’ve stopped through there on
the way to Chicago a few years ago [unclear] program they have out there. They’ve got a
supplementary program to the education system out there, where they have pretty close to
a million dollars every year, because they have organized the parents, the teachers, the
students, the community organizations, the industries, all are a large community of about
twenty something[?] members. Even the unions are a part. And these companies
contributing, individuals contributing, and in the next ten years they hope to have ten
million dollars to supplement and enhance and enrich the program of the school.
Now I presented that to, down here to the--and asked them to explore and see
whether or not it would be feasible here in the city. The lady, that’d be--I forget who--
what’s the name of the lady who was--Sarah Beale[?]. She was the chairman of the
school board. She wrote a letter to the person who has charge to the city publicly. I
couldn’t ever get in contact with her and she never did call me, so I don’t know what
happened. But I believe that’s one way of getting parents, teachers, and all going in the
same direction.
[unclear] about us, we go all in different directions, too. Blacks have a tendency
to do that, and other groups, too, as far as I can see. They said at one time they had a
circus in Chicago and it was twenty-five cents to get to see something you’ve never seen
before. But when they opened up the curtain there was about ten people from the state
[unclear] each one holding the rope, pulling at the state. They all pulling that one thing,
all at the same time, pulling at the same thing. And that’s something they hadn’t seen
before. [laughs]
There’s a fable, too, about the mystic knights--had two rooms, and in those rooms
was a big pot with food in it, but they all had long-handled spoons. And in one room, the
guys were just falling off, they’d get so thin. But in the other room the other fellows were
looking healthy and getting better all the time. What was happening? Those in the other
room who were trying to feed themselves with the long handled spoon couldn’t get it in
the mouth. But in the other room, they had developed a technique. Each person was
feeding another person with the long handled spoon. So they had developed a technique
of cooperation--
WL: Working together.
RW: --and compassion and working with cooperation.
[End of Interview]